


Sex and Dying in High Society

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Listeneise [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Depression, First War with Voldemort, M/M, Music, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 22:00:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4978138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>London, 1980. It's not yesterday anymore, or: a retrospective as told through '77 punk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sex and Dying in High Society

**Author's Note:**

> all the music referenced in this story is linked [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/130955055300/all-the-music-mentioned-in-sdhs) on tumblr.

By the start of their sixth year Sirius had learnt a complicated sort of charm which allowed him to hijack any adjacent Muggle jukebox. With much practice he taught himself to cast the spell wordlessly and with even more practice managed to extend the full enchantment to his physical presence such that every time he walked into an establishment with a jukebox it would cut out the current track and immediately start playing Zeppelin’s Black Dog at the loudest possible volume. Upon his leaving Hogwarts and beginning to work for Dumbledore’s then-nascent Order of the Phoenix he thought it likely most prudent to lift the enchantment so as to somewhat maintain the element of surprise and anonymity and yet he did so with deep regret. It did not, however, stop him from casting the charm whenever he was en route to meet friends in a bar, like a Patronus in advance of his arrival bearing vital messages in the form of Robert Plant’s sexual moaning.

He had gone to meet James and Lily and Peter and Remus in a Muggle pub called the Six Arms bearing news so good he had cast the charm from just outside and burst in the door perfectly in time with the opening lines. They were all looking toward him on the threshold with expressions of utmost contempt except for Lily, whose pregnancy was finally starting to show; she was feigning deep interest in her soda water. No one else in the bar appeared to have noticed neither the change in the music nor the stranger in the door but it was of no matter.

“You should change it to I Wanna Be Your Dog,” said Remus with little expression when Sirius sat down across from him. He was sipping whiskey and there was blood under his fingernails. He was thinner still than at their last encounter (drunk at a Christmas Eve fete hosted by Peter and his then-girlfriend; they had retired together to the fire escape for a joint). Sirius realized then that in the procurement of the good news he had missed the full moon. It had passed two nights previous and he had not noticed it at all.

“That song’s a bit dark, don’t you think, Moony.” He also wasn’t sure he knew how to change the framework of the spell and switch the song. He had had to return the book to the Hogwarts library to avoid Pince’s wrath and hadn’t bothered to copy anything down. “This song is in tune with my aura.” James snorted from across the table. Sirius did not feel the need to remind him he had once begged for enchantment help bewitching jukeboxes to play Stayin Alive in his presence. But that was the beginning of seventh year and they were all feeling like hot shit, James especially, because he had finally managed to lose his virginity. If Lily hadn’t been there Sirius would have regaled them all with a colorful rendition of the tale, but she was, and so he didn’t. “Regardless of each of your questionable opinions,” he said, “I needed Entrance Music ebullient enough to compliment the tidings I come bearing.”

“Fabulous grammatical gymnastics,” said Peter.

“You sound like Moony,” quoth James.

Remus, who had found a toothpick with which to coax the clotted chunks of blood from beneath his nails, turned and punched James in the shoulder. “I haven’t policed anyone’s grammar since third year.”

“Since we started you smoking pot,” said Sirius.

“Since you all helped me realize your grammar was far from the worst of it,” Remus said. “Plus yes, I suppose also the pot.”

“On with the tidings,” said Lily. “I need to eat a whole jar of pickles and watch Coronation Street.”

Two years ago Sirius would have made some smart remark but now was not two years ago. It had turned out Lily was the only person he knew whose gutting rejoinders were as gouging as his own. He loved her for it, and he loved her because James loved her, and it was his own fault that he lay awake thinking about how many of the things he had convinced himself were constants had become increasingly unreliable since they had left school. He said “Well, Mrs. Potter, Gid and Fenwick and I’ve been doing reconnaissance the last three days, and it seems – well Prongs, you recall those Dark messages you and Frank intercepted in November?”

James had been accompanying Longbottom on a quest of Arthurian proportions for some obscure Throbbing Gristle cassette in a Muggle industrial record shop when they saw three familiar faces slip past a bead curtain into a Disillusioned back room. By the time they had contacted a task force of Aurors to raid the place the Death Eaters – James insisted it was the Lestranges and Dolohov – had disappeared. The shop owners, Oblivated to hell, produced Frank’s cassette, and, even after “stringent methods” by the MLE, no further information. Frank had insisted James come over to listen to the tape even though James had expressed his distaste for the genre at the beginning of the search, but when they opened the case and held the tape itself they could feel it had been magicked. With a little finagling and help from Alice they discovered the tape contained a low channel where information was recited in code. Mad-Eye Moody had of course figured everything out in about thirty seconds after they frantically summoned him via two-way mirror – the code language was some ancient Assyrian Wizarding dialect in which several seminal Dark texts had been originally recorded – and decoded the information in a weekend. Then, probably as punishment for something or other, Moody had given the entire stack of parchment to Sirius to figure out what to do with. The Order had tried to get their hands on more cassettes from the shop, but the Ministry had seized the evidence and was refusing to relent. So James said, “Yeah, of course. Frank finally got that tape for real the other day and he won’t shut up about it.”

“In the transcript Moody gave me there were a bunch of references to a stronghold. I won’t bore or humiliate you with the details of my genius but we found it last night. It’s in Cornwall, not far from Plymouth, in this old Muggle fort. Warded to shit so we didn’t dare get too close. But the hair on the back of your neck’ll go up from a mile away.”

“The old man was just saying they had to have some kind of permanentish meeting place,” said Remus from across the table.

“Right you are, Moony,” said Sirius, “and they’ve protected it accordingly. We did a sampling of hexes – ”

“Great album title,” James interrupted.

“ – Anti-Apparition, Unplottability, Disillusionment, et cetera. Gid said something called an Araneum – ”

“Cobweb hex,” Lily supplied. “Rough one. Got an MLE squad in deep shit in Knightsbridge three weeks ago.”

“Anyway I’ve reported to Dumbledore. The higher-ups are mulling over a Course of Action.” Sirius sat back in his chair only a little smugly. “Now I’ll take your questions.”

It seemed no one could think of any, and Remus appeared to be falling asleep. He had propped his elbows up against the table and he was pressing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Good one Pads,” he said.

“I’ll begrudgingly admit you deserved your absurd entrance,” said Peter. 

“What d’you suspect they’ll do from here?” Lily asked.

“Not sure,” said Sirius. “It’d be a huge interdepartmental to-do at the Ministry.”

“It’s a complete bureaucratic nightmare these days,” said Remus, lifting his head wearily. “None of the departments can handle increased security let alone increased responsibility. I was at the Registry for eight hours yesterday.”

Sirius had gone once to the Werewolf Registry with Remus on his seventeenth birthday and hoped never to go near the place again as long as he lived. In the waiting room were several adults, tall and thin and grey in their patched robes, and there was a very young child with her mother, who had been crying in the not-so-distant past and was now trying very hard to stay composed. She was holding tightly to both her daughter’s small hands, and when she looked wildly around the room and settled on Remus he tried to smile gently. It was a smile Sirius had recognized, the one that said, it’ll be alright, even and especially when it certainly would not. Her eyes widened and she looked away. It had taken them two more excruciating hours to see the technician who had tattooed Remus’s shoulderblade with assorted registry codes, and when they got out again into the waiting room the little girl and her mother were gone.

“I thought you only had to go once a year,” said James.

“You’re supposed to check in within thirty-six hours of full moonset now lest they consider you hostile.”

“Can’t you get Dumbledore to excuse you?”

“This isn’t Hogwarts, Pete.” Remus downed the last of his whiskey, then he cracked his back. When he yawned Sirius could see his eyeteeth across the table. “I should get home before one of you has to Side-Along me.”

James looked at his watch. “Damn it Lils, you’ve missed your show.”

“No bother,” she said, “I learnt this spell to rewind the TV.” She stood, smoothing her dress over her belly. It was the sure sign, Sirius had learned over the past few months, that Drinks were Finished. “It’s just a normal _Revertere_ , Peter,” she explained before Pete even had to ask. “Stick the pointy end against the box, yeah?”

 --

Two mornings later Sirius burst from his bedroom with his wand drawn to find the riot of noise from the living room was not in fact a contingent of Death Eaters having pounded down the door but rather it was Remus, who was sitting on the couch looking very focused as he Transfigured a pen into a pair of tweezers with which to pinch the blunt clip Sirius had left out the night previously. He was very loudly listening to Talking Heads’ More Songs about Buildings and Food and singing along under his breath, it was track four, Warning Sign. “It’s the truth – it’s the truth – your glassy eyes – your open mouth – ”

It seemed these days Remus only came over to listen to music and he always did so uninvited with a few vinyl records in a paper bag tucked under his arm. The other day he had showed up with an LP by a band called Young Marble Giants and he had lain on the couch and listened to it, evidently hungover, sipping the chamomile tea Sirius had provided. He did not know where Remus was living but evidently it was somewhere without a record player or a teakettle so he presumed it was some kind of hovel. Remus never wanted to talk about things like that despite Sirius’s attempts at coercion so all they would do was sit in the living room together and listen to records, and eventually Sirius stopped asking. Later in the evening one of them would produce cocaine from somewhere and they would do a bump or two each and go out and try and pull, or at least Sirius would try and pull, and it always came to be that he would realize only in the morning he should perhaps feel some residual awkwardness about having fucked someone, usually loudly, while Remus slept on the couch in the other room. Regardless he would usher this person out quietly, holding their shoes, past Remus’s sleeping form, and then he would sit in the armchair and roll a joint waiting for Remus to wake up. They would make a fry up and listen to another record, and Remus would leave before noon with no ceremony.

This morning the clock on the wall, a holdover from the Muggle landlord, read 8:26 AM. Remus had not recovered from this moon or, seemingly, any of the past years’. He no longer had three square Hogwarts meals a day to rebuild the muscle he damaged running and he no longer had Pomfrey to whip up a three-day supply of analgesic potions and spelled bandages, and he could afford none of the above on his own, because it was illegal for him to hold a Wizarding job, and Muggles did not take kindly to his requested monthly absences. He moved so rigidly with pain Sirius could not fault him for smoking at such an ungodly hour.

“Early for wake and bake,” he said, though he sat down beside Remus on the couch careful not to touch their thighs and accepted the tweezers when they were passed.

Remus exhaled an opaque white cloud. “I’ve been up since four.”

“Doing what?”

Remus fixed him. “Apparating here.”

“That takes five seconds.”

Remus didn’t respond. Sirius took a hit and listened to the song. “Take it easy baby – take it easy – it’s a natural thing – you have to relax – ”

What a scary, fucked up record. Remus was a Talking Heads guy and he had been since sixth year at Hogwarts but sometimes the music was too creepy even for Sirius. Lately they had been listening to a lot of music from America. He and Remus liked this band called Television but James and Peter weren’t into it. If they were stoned enough though they could get into Patti Smith but Peter had to be coerced into smoking with them because of his asthma, and Lily’s relatively conservative Muggle parents had put James off drugs of most varieties. “Alcohol’s a drug,” Remus was fond of saying. With regard to James Sirius had lately thought of Thorogood doing One Bourbon One Scotch and One Beer – “Now you funny too. Everybody funny.”

“It’s – ” Remus was looking past him toward the turntable and behind it the bare wall. “There’s something I have to do. If you want to help me.”

The dog in Sirius’s brain sat and put its tongue out and said yes yes yes yes yes, yes, anything, yes, right now! or perhaps he was just stoned. He said “Alright. Breakfast then hit the dusty trail?”

“We should wait for nightfall,” said Remus. “I was hoping to sleep a bit if you’d let me.”

Sirius tried to recall the condition of the bedroom. He had been eating Every Flavor Beans in bed, alone and stoned, the night before, whilst he read the Quibbler for shits and giggles. His horoscope had suggested he take up saxophone to frighten any stubborn Nargles from his property, and he had laughed about it, to himself, for twenty minutes. He had composed an owl to Remus on the subject but had fallen asleep before he could send it and the paper was strewn about the floor. Still, Sirius had learned exactly two household charms and could probably make something of it. “Tell me what we’re up to tonight and you can take your siesta while I do my errands,” he told Remus now. 

Remus furrowed his brow a little and Sirius suspected he wanted to ask, what errands? Admittedly one of them was part and parcel of his ongoing surreptitious search for his brother’s whereabouts. These days – and it hurt to admit, but it was true – he and Remus could only stay in the same room for a more than an hour if they agreed to let secret business remain secret business. Hence the vinyl, and the drugs. “It’s a follow-up on your find from the other day,” Remus said finally. “I’m to find that stronghold and place an Identification Line. Whoever crosses it, it’ll take information about their wand and sent it straight to this magicked notepad of Dumbledore’s.”

“Complicated bit of work.”

“Yes,” Remus said. “I’ve been practicing and it’ll be alright. The old man said Flitwick vouched for me on account of my Charms NEWT.”

“I thought Lily beat you.”

“So did Alice, but. Dumbledore was intent on this being some kind of stealth mission but I would feel a great deal better if someone had my back and I know from experience you’re an accomplished hexer.”

“You can just out and say I was the best in our year.”

“Certainly from all that practice.”

Little things had been making Sirius angry lately and for a moment this was one of them, and he thought he should tell Remus, you certainly got a lot of practice pretending not to see what’s in front of your face. As if Sirius had ever been solely responsible for all the general rabblerousing. James had shoved everything under the rug for Lily late in seventh year and he had begun to glare daggers if any of it was ever invoked and it seemed Peter was trying to figure out how to get a witch to stick around more than two months and was taking a page out of the Potter Manual of Selective Reveal, since only James had managed it. That left Remus to attempt to take even the slightest co-responsibility, but he would not, and he never really had. In between all the breathless post-prank laughing in the broom closets he would always try very hard to frown for at least ten seconds.

He didn’t say anything, and Remus got up and stretched – his shirt was too small, he stretched an inch of white wrist, white belly; his neck was too long (all of him was too long), and there was a horrible scar at the base of it, just inside the collar, terrible knots, like he had tried to tear his voice out. It was from early in second year, and Sirius had seen it, because this was before they knew or at least before they told Remus they knew, he had seen it a few mornings after Remus had come back from wherever he went, and he had thought, as though it had been very obvious the whole time, oh, a werewolf. “I’m to bed,” he said. “I’ll _Scourgify_ your sheets. I should be up by the time you’re back.”

\-- 

He woke Remus when the dusk began to filter from the East. “Time’s it,” Remus said, voice woozy, when Sirius pulled the shades up to let the scant light in. He turned on his back in the bed. Sirius had Transfigured his old dress robes into blankets of deep red velvet and in them Remus with his pale skin and scars – the flash of grey hair behind his ear and the blood under his fingernails – looked like the holy wounded locked away in Corbenic beyond the wasteland.

“Six PM,” said Sirius from the window.

“Slept all that?” Remus sat up and the blankets slipped off him. He’d borrowed one of Sirius’s shirts to sleep and it was so loose around the neck it showed the full jaggedness of the scar at his collar. Absently he raised his hand to itch a fresh pink one just beneath the neckline.

“You looked like you could’ve used it.”

“Suppose so.” He looked to the window and Sirius in it. “Have you anything I could eat.”

Again he felt the black ember – the Black ember. He did not know why until much later. Remus – practiced at it – ignored the silence and got up, cracking, seemingly, his every joint, like twigs snapping. He found his pants on the floor amidst the scattered papers and the old textbooks, all of them stained now with spilt tea and potions ingredients. “Let’s get a curry,” Sirius said finally. He recalled, their seventh year, drastically abusing their Apparating privileges during Hogsmeade weekends to abscond to Edinburgh and come back with warm takeaway boxes of madras and cashew curries and pakoras and soft naan bread, then get massively stoned and devour it all in the hills behind Hogwarts. But these days the record player in his head was spinning, day in and day out, with uncanny quality, David Byrne in Talking Heads’ New Feeling, singing, “It’s not – yesterday – anymore – ”

 --

They ate in silence at the kitchen table and went out together toward the Disillusioned alley a few blocks down where they could Apparate safely. The clouds shifted around the light of the shrinking halfmoon Northwards in the sky and glowing, radioactive in the smog. Remus treated the moon like some bad itch, or like dogs that followed him. It put a skim-milk blue glow on his face when they wandered out of streetlight into a dark and silent warehouse district and he kept looking at it from under his brow, as if to make sure it hadn’t changed, and Sirius recalled some residual guilt, undigesting like a stone in his belly. “I’m sorry about the other week,” he said. To Remus’s quizzical expression he elaborated: “The moon. You know. I wasn’t there.”

Remus swallowed and studied his scuffed boots with seemingly great interest which was the studied manner of deflecting he had employed since he was a child. “You wouldn’t’ve wanted to be.”

“Well it wouldn’t’ve been so bad if I were there.”

“No,” Remus said, “I mean, I wasn’t alone.” When he fixed Sirius it seemed there was a little too much yellow in the amber of his eyes and Sirius recalled, with a dizzying acid-flashback vividness, the blood under his fingernails in the Six Arms.

“No fucking way,” he said, before his brain could work out anything else. Remus had that vicious feral thing about him he got when he was cornered and Sirius could practically feel his hackles rising but still he said “With him?”

Sirius recalled sometime in the midst of their fifth year not long after the Fiasco watching as Remus read the Daily Prophet at breakfast, followed a lede to page six, and turned a deathly white. His eyes were very big and slowly he stood holding his tie against his chest so it didn’t fall into his cream of wheat and it was though he did not hear them when they spoke to him. He put the paper down and it toppled Peter’s pumpkin juice and he stormed out of the Great Hall with the violent slamming of the heavy doors. On the page when they looked were a selection of very boring headlines but also in the top left corner a blurry moving photograph of someone named Fenrir Greyback. _From Pg. 1: Werewolf Suspected in Brutal Killings_. James and Peter went to Divination (Peter was failing at the time and James had two weeks’ worth of detentions queued up already) but Sirius skived off and found Remus an hour later in the sixth floor bathroom having long since vomited all the meager contents of his stomach. He was sitting on the tile floor, legs akimbo, leaning against the stall for support; he’d thrown his tie and it lay belly-up like a dead snake beneath one sink. When Sirius crouched down beside him and touched his shoulder he flinched away. His face was gray and outside the moon was waxing. Remus had not condescended to allow Sirius unaccompanied in his presence since the Event. He looked up miserably and pulled his knees to his chest. “This irony’s glaring,” he said, his voice raw with acid. “You wanna hold my hand through this when you tried to get me to kill someone for you?” Even the grey drained from his face then and he fought himself to his knees and dry-heaved violently and Sirius held his hair back from his forehead. It seemed at some juncture Remus had somehow taken a chunk out of the back of his ear and looking at it, of all things, Sirius started crying. He sat across from Remus and wept and wept and Remus watched him and dry-heaved some more and finally after an hour or so they cleaned up and went to Transfiguration. After that it had been better between them, marginally.

Now, turning into the Disillusioned alley with his wand drawn, Remus shook his head. “Others for now. One day soon it’ll be him.”

“Fuck.”

“I can handle myself.”

“It’s not you that concerns me.”

“You go out there and risk your life fighting people you’ve known from childhood,” Remus said. It seemed when he got angry his favorite activity was pointing out Sirius’s assorted hypocrisies. “People who made your life miserable when you were young. People who believe dearly in their hearts that you turned your back on who you were supposed to be.”

“It’s different.”

Remus grabbed his shoulder – for the Side-Along spell, but rather tighter than was strictly necessary. Sirius could feel his bones, his ragged fingernails. “Do tell me how.”

But he couldn’t. To Remus’s credit he refrained from looking at all victorious, then the brick blurred to black and faded, and they were moving with the telltale nauseating jolt into the womb of the darkness.

\-- 

Sirius had never asked Remus what it felt like to be a werewolf. It seemed obvious it must have felt nearly normal except for the blinding pain – like a reverse birth – once a month, and then the blackness. A blackness bearing no sense and no memory, blackness like the blink of an eye that opened up again upon more pain. It must have been the opposite of how it felt to be a woman, he imagined once when stoned. Instead of death – ruin, horror, contagion – it was life women could kindle once a month and they too had a bloody curse connected. The lycanthropy was tidal. It ebbed and flowed and shifted with reliability. It changed the shape of Remus; it left things behind itself, then it came and picked them up again.

He had once, however, asked Remus what he remembered of what happened, and Remus had laughed. They were stoned and probably it was sixth year and they were listening to Abbey Road. James and Peter had gone on a kitchen raid and left Sirius and Remus alone in the common room; it was a Friday, it was past midnight, Remus’s homework was abandoned somewhere, though he had written several extremely baked-sounding sentences they would all copy later about the 1665 Defenestration of Gloucester, widely considered the founding impetus for the American Wizarding Congress, etc. Sirius recalled he had not seen the point in learning about American Wizarding politics so he had been skiving off History of Magic customarily of late in order to scout secret passages and hide in them, smoking joints, until unlucky Slytherins passed.

Anyway it was not like he had been wondering it since first year or anything but he finally summoned the chutzpah to ask Remus if he remembered having been turned into a fucking werewolf. Tactless as ever, Black, he scolded himself in the memory. Remus had cocked an eyebrow and looked down at him – Sirius had been lying on his back on the Oriental rug, which itched his back where his shirt had ridden up, and Remus was sitting crosslegged, drumming on his knee with his fingertips. Thank heaven he had properly judged Remus royally stoned and thus thoroughly possessed by his own holy resignation. Since late in fourth year whenever Sirius and James had a particularly juicy prank idea they would get Remus absolutely baked before they would run it by him and he would stare at them both and then sigh and say, “Agh, fine.” Now he said, “I was taking the kitchen scraps out to compost in the garden.” Sirius thought, God, that is implicit in his goddamn character. “He was in the forest. It was sunset so. It was a man. He said, I’ll kill your mum and dad. So I went with him. I felt like a tiny martyr. We walked – then. Well. The sky turned gray. I think I knew what was happening – ”

The worst part about it was he had asked Remus to tell him in the first place and so he couldn’t tell Remus to stop, plus he likely would not had Sirius tried; it was like he was in a trance. He settled for praying James and Peter would hurry up and come back from the kitchen. The record had come to the end of the side and it was shuffling and clicking against itself like some demonic typewriter.

“ – or what was about to happen; I don’t know, time, Sirius, time stretched way the fuck out. I knew whatever bad thing was gonna happen as soon as it got dark and I was waiting for it – and it didn’t – it didn’t come. And he was holding my wrist, and then he – he stopped, he – he tore my shirt – ”

“Stop,” Sirius yelled; if there had been birds in the rafters they would’ve flown. “Fuck, fuck, please, stop.”

Remus cracked his back and it echoed in Sirius’s brain. “If you want to believe I don’t remember a thing from there I’ll let you.”

 --

It was cold by the water when the dark let them go and the violent wind off the sea whipped in Remus’s hair. He had brought them to the far outskirts of a village called Rame, the last outpost on a promontory jutting into the Channel where it met the Celtic Sea. The dirt road wasn’t wider than a truck and it was overgrown about the banks of it, showing in the mud tire tracks where vehicles had slipped off. All the brush was waist-high and stunted with the wind. The rain had passed and the moon showed, sharp like a wedge of melon or a sickle knife, and it reflected in the puddles caught red in the soil. Away, the glow of lights in windows, fields and the sea, stretching black, the inexorable sound of it beneath the moon’s pull.

“I can feel it,” said Remus, wrinkling his nose. They had felt Death Eater magic first the July after they had left Hogwarts in an attack on a Wizarding neighborhood in Gravesend and it was not to be forgotten, the sickness of it, the rot, feverish and yellow, acrid, chemic – like chlorine – in the back of your throat. A fine white coating that settled and stuck. Ash – bone ash, for assorted magics – and dust, bad dust, the kind of dust with fear in a handful. Beneath it, all the green, the Cornish air, the night, the sea (fear, loveliness) was like its own museum. But all there was to do, all there ever was to do, was go closer.

They cast a Disillusionment charm and walked together in the silence and the wind along the cliff and Remus lit a cigarette they shared against the taste in the air. “Looks like the cover of 20 Jazz Funk Greats,” said Sirius, and Remus laughed. They spoke a little about the spell to hide they were nervous. It was in fact on its surface not the most dangerous thing they had ever done, or would ever do, by a long shot.

They made their way down a steep escarpment with a left-behind rope handhold (they were wary of using excess magic) and came up upon the stronghold from the sea side, feeling the spume and wind upon their backs as they circled. Sirius had not come quite so close with Prewett and Fenwick and realized he probably should have asked James to borrow the invisibility cloak this time as neither he nor Remus were master Disillusioners, but it was far and away too late now. “It’s the same spells as on Hogwarts,” whispered Remus, “The defense spells, deterrents for Muggles; you can feel, right?”

There was a grotesque and uncanny familiarity to it that turned his stomach. Looking at the structure, concrete hexagon butted into the cliff, dating perhaps to the last World War, was like looking at shed snakeskin, or through water. In his peripheral he could almost see the real flesh beneath the magic construct. From inside, light and sound – he could feel the sound in his bones and feel the light in his skin, but he could not hear it and he could not see it. In his hand he felt his wand – his complete magic subconscious – jittering to cast something, to Apparate, to put a shield up, to make it somehow easier to breathe. Instead he followed Remus, who started to the West, jumping stones deftly with his wand held to the sand, whispering lines of an incantation snatched by the sea wind.

He thought of the hexes he knew. Certainly this would warrant deadly force – would it? There would be paperwork to do if he killed someone, but it was of no matter. _Sectumsempra_ , he thought, would be a good one and he could do it wordless. _Rictumsempra_ , to get someone out of his way. There was the Leech Hex he had been dying to use, but he wasn’t sure he remembered the spell exactly. Then there was that really savage one, from the old Black library, that made your ears ring horrifically – but they probably knew that one too. Bellatrix did, for certain, because she’d used it on him once, when he was twelve or thirteen, and it had taken him three days of agony to find the countercurse…

In reverie he nearly fell over Remus, who had stopped in his tracks. He pulled Sirius down by the shoulder and they crouched together in the cold wet sand – he could feel Remus, moving with his breath, the tense muscle in his wand arm where he held the spell in progress. There was a hole in the Disillusioning ward on the old fort and Sirius’s first thought was that it could not have been a mistake. His second thought was the realization that the marbled white construction within the gap, glossy in moonlight, spell-light, firelight from somewhere, was a kind of decorative ossuary arranged sculpturally of very many tiny skulls.  

Bellatrix when they were young in the sitting room at Grimmauld Place: it was Christmas and Sirius’s father had given her an antique Dark text purportedly transcribed by the assistants of Gilles de Rais. She looked up at him on the threshold and behind him Regulus, who feared her and always had, hovering in the shadow on the stairs, his nervous sweat sticking in his wool jacket. Even the fire was cold. She said, voice like a bell, “Blood magic works best when you use children.”

Remus broke the spell he was casting; Sirius could feel it go, like a rubber band snapping. His wand hand sealed over Sirius’s mouth – the cypress of it, warm with his grip, vibrating with his magic, pressed to his lips – just in time for Sirius’s exclamation to muffle against it. Remus had clapped his other hand over his own mouth, knuckles white, a tight seal. Shadows moved before them, shifting darkness; he smelled blood then, amongst the rest of it. The crackling transformative feeling of someone else’s dark magic under his skin, silvery and seductive, bitter on his tongue.

He grasped Remus’s arm and had begun to focus, blindly and against hope, on Apparition, when the world burst in firework display above their heads – vivid colored light, aurora borealis, Doppler whistle above, slipping down the back of his neck like cold rain. The jolt of adrenaline that struck through his heart seemed to slow the world down, and next to him Remus had a spell in his mouth even before he took his hand away from Sirius’s face. He stood, limbs unfolding, and cast it flat, a wide net of golden fire. With no sound he screamed, RUN.

They ran. There was no sound but the sea. Sirius felt the light of the Death Eaters’ curses at his heels and nothing beyond. At the edge of the beach where they would have to climb the rope again to the road above he turned and roared the most powerful spell he had ever attempted in his life – “ _Impedimentia_!”

They slowed like they were caught in the pulling tide. Even their spells slowed. Beside his head some red hex burst in the chalk. There were five of them, hooded, and none his cousin (he knew her, tall and slender and with her hood exuding her wild black curls), and he understood they had been waiting. Perhaps they had performed blood rituals here once in some bygone day but now they knew the information had been leaked and they had set out bait, they had spread the glue trap, and they had waited – for someone young, stupid, righteous, desperate – for them.

Later he would hardly remember climbing the rope, or how they managed. Remus was ahead of him and the rubber was peeling from the soles of his boots and they helped each other along with magic. At the crest of the cliff huddled together in the wind and gasping for breath they had to cast the spell together to manage Apparition. His palm was rubbed raw from the rope when he grasped the elbow of Remus’s denim jacket, focused hard into Remus’s vivid will, the moonlight glow of his magic, let Cornwall blur.

“Seven times,” Moody had instructed during the Order’s one ill-fated attempt at In-Service Training. “Death Eaters have been known to track Apparition for at least three jumps, and thusly, in any extraction scenario, you must Apparate seven times to unique, non-combatant locations before you can consider yourself free and clear and Apparate to any sensitive areas. Do not Apparate to the homes of anyone you know. Do not Apparate to Muggle-frequented areas. Have a plan,” he had barked, “And tell nobody.”

Remus had taken them to a clearing in some dark woods illuminated by moonlight only in whose shadows Sirius saw the skeleton of an abandoned shed, decaying in increments but for its heavy oak door. The magic on it was like Remus’s but it wasn’t quite, and it was dawning on Sirius what this place must be when Remus grabbed his shoulder roughly. “Your turn,” he said, breathless, “Let’s go.”

He drew what he could from Remus and from the old magic that must have been his father’s and thought, destination, determination, deliberation, and pressed forward. It felt quite like being wrung out, like a dishcloth. When they arrived in Margate Sirius’s vision was black and spinning and he clung to the forearm of Remus’s jacketsleeve until he could stand straight again. “Margate?” Remus asked. Down the hill the sea spread so black he couldn’t tell where it dissolved into sky.

“My uncle Alphard had a summer home in Broadstairs,” said Sirius, though in fact he had been thinking of the Waste Land. He held out his hand to Remus. “Your turn.”

The wrenching feeling – needling winter rain and owlcalls – and he opened his eyes upon another dark woods. Through the trees the forest opened onto a lake swollen with snowmelt in the long valley, silvering with starlight. Remus bent double and spat. “Snowdonia,” he said, catching his breath. “I woke up here last week.” When he stood his eyes were veined red against their yellow; Sirius took his hand and dragged them both through ether to the hamlet outside Doncaster where he’d slept behind dumpsters for two nights, sixteen and a dog, fleeing London. From the moment his feet touched the ground the nausea dizzied him; he dry-heaved once, twice, tasting acid – seawater in his throat. Remus grabbed his shoulder. “Can you go?”

“Can _you_ go?” But Remus didn’t answer and when Sirius opened his eyes again they were in Ireland and Remus had bent away from him to vomit. “Is this Londonderry?”

Remus laughed or sobbed or something. “It’s Derry,” he rasped, “Do you want to get shot?”

Sirius took them next to Islay where he had once accompanied select among his family on a tour of the Wizarding scotch whisky estates, and when the island – the endless flat peat bogs blue in the moonlight unto the sea – faded in from the fog it was blurry through his tears. “Are you crying,” Remus panted.

“It’s hard,” Sirius managed through his aching throat, “across the water, it’s hard.”

It was more and more difficult each time to hold all his pieces together. It was like holding a fist of his whole body. Remus’s hand wrapped the back of his neck, tangling his hair; he grabbed Remus’s elbow and held tight, as tight as he could through the horrible wringing black hole squeeze, and Remus landed them sloppily in the alleyway behind the Six Arms. There they collapsed upon the cold asphalt leaning against the brick walls and Sirius could hear the wheezing catch of pain in Remus’s breath (he knew what Remus sounded like when he hurt; he knew it incontrovertibly, he knew what Remus sounded like and looked like and smelt like when he hurt) until he said, nearly soundless in his exhaustion, “You owe me a drink.”

“How’s that.”

“I did four,” said Remus. He held up four shaking white fingers. “You did three.”

“I did that _impedimentia_.”

“I did the stinging net,” Remus said, weakly cocking one eyebrow, “and I did it wordless; you owe me a drink.”

 --

It took them another quarter hour to get up and when they could manage they limped one after the other in through the back door. The bartender saw how they looked and brought the bottle and two tumblers. “Hey hey mama,” Remus sang tunelessly toward the retreating back, “said the way you move…”

“Didn’t think it fit the mood,” said Sirius, pouring them each liberal whiskeys.

“Would’ve beaten you to a bloody pulp if you’d put that on.”

“Maybe Your Time is Gonna Come,” said Sirius. “Or Gallows Pole.” He clinked Remus’s glass and they both downed the shots; he watched Remus’s throat move and he thought for a second he could see the heart beating – thank God – in the thrumming blue vein just beneath his jaw.

“I’d go for Gallows Pole.”

“Should’ve bewitched you with that in school.”

“Prongs wanted Stayin Alive,” said Remus, “do you remember that.”

“Pete wanted some Jefferson Airplane.”

“White Rabbit,” Remus recalled. “Remember he claimed to be tripping on Halloween? Lily pretended to have none of it but she told me she wanted Queen Bitch by Bowie. I really wanted you to do I Wanna Be Your Dog.” He refreshed their whiskeys and downed his and spun the empty glass upon the counter. “Now I would say, in all seriousness you should make mine Joy Division.”

“Isolation?”

“I was gonna say Dead Souls. And yours the Clash. Guns of Brixton.”

Sirius had been listening to London Calling often lately and upon Remus’s invocation he could nearly hear the rhythm. When they kick down your front door, how you gonna come? “You spend a lot of time thinking about this.”

“I thought of them for all of us,” Remus said. “All of us then and now. After the moon, in Snowdonia, I was just lying there. They don’t have anything – well they have these kind of Muggle potions like, stolen from hospital, but they scare me. It takes your pain away but it takes away everything else too. Sometimes they die of it. If you take too much – you know it’s like the Dreamless Sleep Pomfrey used to dole out. You won’t wake up. I’d rather hurt, even that bad, you know, it’s something. Anyway I was thinking if we walked into a room together it should play Marquee Moon. I remember how the darkness doubled…”

He did a decent Tom Verlaine. Sirius hated thinking about him freshly human without Padfoot licking the wounds. He had discovered of late, with some chagrin, that most of his fondest memories of Remus – the purest and brightest among the compendium, before the Snafu and its discontents, before the looming spectre of Adulthood, in the halcyon days when the war itself was like a bad dream you forgot about upon waking – had been made while he was a dog.

“I was thinking if he’d raised me I would want to join Voldemort,” Remus continued. He likely would have continued – in one of his rare confessional trances – if Sirius had gotten up to piss or fainted dead away or begun dueling the bartender. “Everything he tells them is true. Yes, in the real world, wizards treat you like shit or worse and Muggles use you as a metaphor for insatiable male sexuality. From the outside I know he just wants dogs he can sic and then cull when it’s over but I wouldn’t know that. I’d buy it hook line and sinker like they’re all doing now. I go and talk to them and run with them but I know all the while I can’t do shit. They see me and they think, this is what comes of being Dumbledore’s anointed. The great assimilationist fantasy. He can’t keep a job. He’s broke – he must hardly eat. He’s ripped himself to pieces because they won’t let him hunt. Nobody wants him – nobody would notice if he were just gone. And I can see, however it ends, they’ll die. If we win, which is looking unlikelier every goddamn day, the Ministry’ll say, they sided with him, put em all down.”

“I’ll hide you away in an attic.”

“Ta, Pads, but I’ll John Proctor on them if it gets so far. Another shot?”

Sirius nodded and Remus poured them out. Drunkenly in school he’d said to Remus, “You’re like the lycanthrope Dickens on account of you’re such a master of the vivid and grim.” Remus had just looked at him, then he’d said something like, you’re one to talk. It was true when Sirius got crossfaded he tended to climb into someone else’s bed and Talk About His Family. On this night in particular they had brought Peter’s portable cassette boombox, a birthday gift from his Muggle cousin, up to the top of the Astronomy tower; it played the Velvet Underground’s All Tomorrow’s Parties. “You can turn into a fucking Grim, Padfoot,” said James, exhaling a vaporous cloud. That was that. Peter was doing his Nico impression – “WHAT COSTUME SHALL A POOR GIRL WEAR” – and it seemed, at least then, that Remus’s Dickensian gloom soliloquies were not all that dissimilar. Then again they were very drunk, they were all sixteen, they had all passed their OWLs, they had not killed each other or anyone else, and no one had tried to kill any of them, yet.

Someone had gone to the jukebox and, perhaps accessing Spiritus Mundi or perhaps actively performing Leglimency, they had put on I Wanna Be Your Dog. At the sound of the distinctive opening chords Remus laughed his worst laugh, the desiccating one. The song was the first thing Sirius had thought of when he had become Padfoot early in fifth year and for months following he would tease Remus with it at every possible juncture. Of late he had taken to sitting on the couch listening to the Stooges, staring into space and smoking joints and wondering where Remus was, and what he was doing, if he was alright, and what record he would bring over next he came unannounced. Just like a dog, he thought, ever like a dog, whining at the door when its master leaves. In his stoned moments of dismal self-psychoanalysis he told himself, no one loved you enough when you were young, and now you’re so starved for it it’s frankly humiliating. Possibly it’s your tragic flaw.

Sirius thought perhaps he was trying to say, I would notice if you were gone, and I would feed you if you let me, but he was too tired, and he was too drunk. Instead he said, “I’m still your dog, Moony.”

Remus laughed horribly again, and he said “You’re not. You never were. Not like this.”

“I learned it for you.”

“I know. But that’s different. Right?”

It seemed very obvious for a split second then it disappeared again. Like it had always been? “I don’t know.”

Remus’s eyes were big and his ears were red. “Because what just – we almost.”

“No,” Sirius said, then, “fuck.”

“Yes,” Remus said, “am I – ”

“Misunderstanding? I don’t think so. I want to – ” Again he lost the thread of it. He was sure he had been meaning to say something that sounded good. “Fuck.”

“You can,” Remus told him, leaning close, breath bitter, eyes yellow. “You can. I’d like that. I thought you would’ve tried before. But there’s – for everything, there is a season.”

“It wasn’t even – I didn’t get it before.”

“But you do now?”

“Yes.” I’d’ve died if you did, he should’ve said. I’d’ve carried your corpse to Dumbledore and I would’ve committed seppuku on his desk directly following. “It’s all – everything’s ending, isn’t it? I don’t have any more time.”

He was speaking about the world, and he suspected about James, and also about Remus, who was dissolving in increments before his very eyes, turning thin and greyer, bleaching out. Everything was seeping through the great drain and soon it would be gone, and there would be no telling what would come after, and so all the very rash actions would have to be taken now while they could be. Otherwise he would not be Sirius Black, in the face of death or worse.

Remus’s mouth was open a little. If ever there had been a time he was attractive it was certainly not now but Sirius felt he had never wanted anything with more conviction. “Come outside,” he said, despite it all. “I’d like to kiss you.”

 --

It was snowing – it would melt by morning – and Remus tasted like whiskey and blood. Inside someone had put on the jukebox Bowie’s Moonage Daydream. They each were trying to shove the other against the alley wall but Remus won, because Sirius slipped on a patch of ice. It knocked the breath out of him and in trying to catch it back he bit Remus’s lip, hard. More than any other kissing he had done before it was oddly like fighting. Remus’s hands were under his shirt and very cold, nails and knuckles ragged.

For something he had not even imagined happening until twenty minutes previous it seemed utterly like the fulfillment of nine years worth of sexual tension, albeit sexual tension he had never fully realized. He was so scattered he Apparated them onto the kitchen counter of his flat, shattering several dishes in the drying rack by the sink. In the streetlight through the windows Remus put Suicide on the record player. Sirius turned the light on and Remus turned it off. “I’ve seen you naked a million times,” Sirius said, against Remus’s jaw, and Remus didn’t say anything. In the end the streetlight was sexy; through the window above the couch it was like a soft white blanket and when Remus took his shirt off his scars were glowing in it. He was straddling Sirius’s lap and Sirius could hear his nails scrabbling at the fabric of the slipcover behind his own head. He was trying to recall if he had ever thought about this before – maybe sometime, when they were stoned in the prefect’s bath, and Remus would wait until he thought everyone’s back was turned to take his dressing gown off, but Sirius would watch his unfailingly distorted reflection of one of the faucets, in which he looked even more like some funhouse mirror accident than he did customarily. Shoulders, bones, hips, and all his limbs seemed too long, like someone had stretched him out on a rack. The bite – the real one – was low on his side and had sliced through his navel. Remus had seen him looking that time and shoved him underwater but when Sirius came spluttering up he was smiling. Bless the stoned resignation, he had thought, but there was none of that now, and when he found the scar Remus flinched away. Light from the street played on his face and caught rainwashed amber in his eyes and Sirius thought, now you’re too far away, even though his thumbs were in the soft part just above Remus’s hips. He said, “We can’t fuck to this record, Remus. We can’t fuck to Frankie Teardrop.”

Remus’s fingers curled against the back of his neck with the thumb pressed up against his ear, lips parted, bitten red, and something like a smile showed his eyeteeth for a split second. “I’ll start the side over,” he said, hoarse and soft. His eyelids fluttered a little, because Sirius had taken advantage of his relative stillness to get a hand in his pants. “I – I won’t flip it.”

I’ll never be able to listen to this record again, Sirius thought. It had come out December of seventh year, he recalled, and he hadn’t liked it much until he did coke for the first time. Then it was like – yes – faster – faster – faster – and when he’d bought the motorbike in a fit of postgrad pique James had sung him Ghost Rider at every possible interval. Even Remus had ridden with him on it above the thin clouds in that weird dry summer, clutching his waist for his undear life though later he denied this, singing, “baby baby baby he’s lookin so cute sneakin round round round in a blue jumpsuit…”

Did this matter now? Sirius had been stroking Remus through his underwear but presently Remus took his wrist and pushed his hand past what seemed the point of absolutely no return. There must have been some spell he hadn’t heard, and what, or who, had Remus been doing since Hogwarts? because it seemed with very little effort he had two fingers inside Remus who rocked against him now with the flowing tidal rhythm of the music and kissed him with increasing sloppiness and tasted, still, like blood, because he had bitten his tongue. He pulled back again and Sirius could feel him swallow, the heart beating, the clammy hand on his throat, his voice – vibration through him like some instrument – and the stereo in the corner – vibration – theremin – and Remus said, against his mouth, a rhythmic whisper like something Alan Vega would sing, maybe, “I want, I want to be, to be under you…”

Sirius thought that could be arranged. He had Remus flat upon the couch, his hair wild in the slipcover throwing static, naked in the pale light, heels pressing his back, and the record clicked and shuffled over and over again when it came to the end of the side. After not so very long Remus put his head back to show his throat, which he never would’ve done had he had his wits about him. Even the wolf had never done it for Padfoot.

\-- 

“What are we gonna do about this now,” Remus said. They were leaning against opposite ends of the couch and Sirius himself was naked but Remus had found his shirt on the floor and put it back on. The dawn light was coming in soft and grey through the window and against the glass a gentle rain patterned.

“Clean up,” said Sirius, “sleep til noon. Make a fry up and floo Dumbledore.”

“I mean this this.” Remus passed his open hand between them. “What are we gonna do about it.”

“I don’t know. Does it need to be negotiated?”

“I guess not.” Remus sat up; on the floor he found his pants and his cigarettes in the pocket, then he lay down again. “We’ll be dead soon.”

Six weeks ago he would’ve said, don’t say that. Instead he said “Right.”

Remus passed the cigarette across the couch to him and their hands touched like in the Creation of Adam. He held the smoke from his last drag in when he said, “Did you ever think about doing that before?” Then he exhaled vaporously and in the still dawn light it all dissolved.

“Not really,” Sirius lied. “You?”

“I used to have sex dreams about you when we were in school,” Remus told him. “Not just you, but it was you a lot. And in fifth year, After, I had this dream over and over that you stuck your wand inside me and Summoned my guts.” The feeling was rather like a bulldozer but Remus kept going. “It felt almost like that when I looked at you, like in class, or in the dorm, and you would be trying so hard with your eyes to tell me you were sorry, and it would feel like you were pulling all my guts out. That’s why I didn’t want to talk to you for so long. That and I came in the dream every time and I was humiliated about it.”

“Were there any not quite so horrible among your nocturnal reveries of me?”

“Half of Hogwarts would have come to a Sex Dreams About Sirius Black support group.”

“That hardly answers my question,” said Sirius, passing the cigarette back, “And I take offense to hear only half.”

“Maybe two thirds,” said Remus, “No Slytherins by default. They would have made some separate peace.” Sirius laughed while Remus took a drag of the cigarette and ashed it in the cut glass tray. “I had plenty of good dreams about you,” he said then. “Not as good as just now. But they were good.”

“Just now was good?”

Remus cocked his eyebrow. “My come’s all on your belly.”

“Yes,” said Sirius, “but.” Remus waited. “I worried I had to’ve hurt you.”

Remus sighed and put the cigarette out in the ashtray and stood. His shirt, stuck to his skin, had gone sheer against his stomach and the fabric showed the scars. Sirius reached for him, for the inside of his thigh, the skin warm and slick, unmarked there, wet and shimmery in the refracting dawn, pulled him close, and Remus bent to kiss the top of his head with a rare and fragile reverence, hands in his hair, against the back of his neck, and softly he said, “You couldn’t if you tried.”

 --

Remus was on the couch listening to the Modern Lovers and he had brought vegetables and chocolates from the grocery down the street in an overstretched plastic bag. He was smoking a cigarette and he still looked thin and in the morning light through the window the grey bits in his hair were very evident, but when Sirius came into the living room, awoken by the sound, he smiled. Sirius was still half asleep. He said, “Good morning.”

There was a burst blood vessel in Remus’s eye, but he smiled. “Good morning.”

It seemed like it made everything better, or it made everything worse. They tried to make an omelet but it burnt to a crisp when they abandoned it to fuck on the kitchen table so instead they ate chocolate naked on the floor.

This cannot last, thought Sirius, but did I expect it to? Do I expect anything to even my own heartbeat these days?

They slept til sundown in Sirius’s bed and when they woke they ate takeaway cashew curry with their fingers. Remus put on Bauhaus – or Devo, or Wire, or Squeeze, or the B-52s – and they got stoned and practiced defensive spells on one another and laughed and laughed. In a rotation established by Dumbledore they guarded apparently precious things with the other members of the Order until they began to drop like flies. They executed so many wills they eventually wrote their own, and they went to so many funerals they eventually began to wear only black. They went to funerals where there were no bodies, and funerals where there were just pieces of bodies, and funerals where it was rumored St. Mungo’s mortuary staff had had to disentangle many humans’ worth of flesh and guts in order to heap them all in separate coffins. In the bar afterwards they mythologized the deceased and the manner of their expiry with increasingly drunken hyperbole and took high-rolling bets on who would die next. In the six months before their deaths the Prewetts staked over a hundred galleons on Remus. “Ha ha bloody ha,” Remus would say, but he agreed they were good odds.

The singer from Joy Division died and in America Mount St. Helens erupted and in July Lily had James’s son. That autumn Alice Longbottom pocketed the cash when the Prewetts themselves died. “Nappies for the baby,” she said.

Sirius would have denied he waited in bed on weekend mornings to see if Remus would come over with a record to listen to. Alone in the flat he would summon a Patronus just to sit with him and he would lie as Padfoot on the couch smelling Remus in the fabric – a white dog and a black dog, until he could not keep the ghost one up any longer and it would flicker and fade. There was no longer enough happiness. He too would wonder invariably if he was really there, for a second.

He felt sometimes he would come out of the sadness the way you did out of being drunk, or being high, and sometimes when he was most lucid he would yearn for the sadness back. He had accustomed himself to moving under the weight of the sadness – reporting to Dumbledore under the weight of the sadness – fighting Death Eaters under the weight of the sadness – making love to Remus under the weight of the sadness. Holding the child under the weight of the sadness. He listened to Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf and Lightnin Hopkins. He accrued a milk crate of blues vinyl from bins at Muggle record shops and he would surreptitiously Disillusion it when Remus came over. The record player in his head spun a thousand sounds at once and he laid awake listening to it, beside Remus in the red velvet with all their skin close and touching, symphonic with Remus breathing, with the sounds of his dreams. Usually somewhere in the cacophony was Tom Verlaine singing Marquee Moon: “I remember how the darkness doubled – I recall lightning struck itself – I was listening to the rain – I was hearing something else – ”

 --

Near the end of things Remus would come over with the new X record Wild Gift. July, 1981. At the time there were mutterings. At dinner in May Remus had claimed a previous engagement and Peter had said, after Lily had put the baby to bed, and after they had each had about four Sirius-strength nightcaps, “I can’t – I don’t know, these days, that I trust Remus.” Lily had slapped him then burst into tears. Sirius looked wildly to James but he was staring into the fire. He had to think of his son. Two weeks later Sirius helped them move and told no one. In another week he woke still drunk at noon when Remus arose from the bed to dress, and in silence Sirius watched him stretch, naked, scratch his crotch, clean himself where he could, touch gingerly the bruising red mark at his collarbone where Sirius with teeth had drawn blood.

“It’s better than Los Angeles,” said Remus now, from the couch. He was rolling a joint on Sirius’s battered Brautigan compendium. He had taken the bandages off his hands for the first time in two and a half weeks. It seemed unfair, but the moon was waxing again, and the wounds were still red.

Exene sang the first song – “he hung me,” she sang, “with the endless rope.” Sirius had planned what he would tell Remus next he came over with vinyl. Don’t go with them, he would say, Apparate with me this month to the forest of our marginally innocent youth, and we can run together, and I will keep your teeth from yourself, and when they ask me if I know where you’ve gone, I can say, he’s gone with me – I mean _with_ me. He said nothing; they smoked the joint on the couch and then Remus’s wounded fingers were in Sirius’s mouth, and then Remus’s cock was in his mouth, and when Remus came he pulled Sirius’s hair, hard, and he said, “Fuck me, fuck me, come on,” and Sirius did, and the record ended. He lay with his head on Remus’s chest and could not hear his heartbeat – he thought he heard his own – and Remus stroked his hair. After a while Remus got up and cast a cleaning charm and put the record back in the sleeve and left. Sirius recalled nothing of the album beyond I’m Coming Over, and he did not listen to it again until he was thirty-five.

On his own in the flat he had been listening to all the old bluesmen sing about the wolf at the door. What does one do when you have let the beast in? He lay on the couch and wondered. It was not the last time, nor the worst.

\--

\--

In December of 1985 Remus received the cassette he had ordered of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut record Psychocandy and listened on a Sunday morning while he cleaned house. At the time he was living in a flat above a sweetshop in Dharamsala at the foot of the Himalayas where he had been hired by the headmaster of a local magic academy to keep Dark creatures from the property. They had never had trouble in the mountains until white people had come and now they resented having to hire white people to keep the beasts from the door so there were a lot of pointed silences and accusatory glares but generally Remus was left alone to do his job. Once or twice his boss had asked if he wanted to come play cricket but he refused; he had terrible hand-eye coordination and of late his transformation had been aggravating something in his knee.

He was 25 and walked in the streets of that city with a limp he tried to disguise with heavy boots. It was warm all the year round – only this month had the temperature began to reach single digits. His employer understood his condition and offered him use of the colonial dungeon on the property. He mail-ordered cassettes from a catalog but often they were stolen from his mailbox by the neighborhood children.

Months earlier he had ordered the Jesus and Mary Chain’s single Never Understand and he liked it so much he ordered the full album when he saw it had come out. He put it on and turned it up loud, and outside it was raining, just a little, rendering the streets and the mountains in a soft smudgy blur, like an impressionist painting. The first song had that Be My Baby drumbeat shrouded in Velvet Underground guitar haze. He was making tea on the hotplate (Darjeeling) and in his wool socks on the hardwood floor he took careful rhythmic steps. He was in the kitchen cleaning the counters when the second song started and drew him back like a magnet into his living room, to the tape player and the stacked boxes of cassettes and vinyl magicked into a tower before the wide windows.

As if staring at it would make it different or make it stop. He picked up the case like it would snap his fingers off. The song was called The Living End. He dropped the case and it clattered on the floor and he hit the stop button on the cassette player but the music wouldn’t stop. Again – again – again – it wouldn’t stop.

He could feel magic like he hadn’t since he was a child. It was just beneath his skin and it was hot. After the Event he had not done a single spell for weeks. He couldn’t bear the feeling of it. He couldn’t touch his wand or any of the spellbooks and he thought about burning everything.

Jim Reid even sounded like Sirius when he would sing while he was doing dishes. “I get so wild on my motorbike… I’m breaking loose on this moonlit night…”

Remus picked up the tape player and tore the battery shield off the bottom and ripped all the batteries out. He pulled the door open and pulled the tape out and dropped the player on the floor (it left a dent in the wood) and he gutted all the black thread from the cassette with his teeth and nails. He did not notice his hands were bleeding, rich velvet red from under the fingernails.

“I’m in love with myself – there’s nothing else but me – and an empty road – ”

He smashed the tape beneath his heel on the floor and knelt and broke the hollow body until it was pieces. He stretched the thread woven between his fingers like squid-ink pasta and tore it in a few places and shoved it aside in a great tangle and reached for the tape player again, into the back of it where there were still guts to disassemble. He hadn’t done magic without meaning to in over a decade. Everything came apart in his hands like it was made of balsawood and when it was done he spread all the pieces out around him on the floor like the material for some ritual. He sorted and arranged it all like he had done his potions ingredients in school. Screws, tape, batteries, plastic shards, spools, metal casing…

There was no sound anymore except what was playing in his head (“There’s nothing else but me – there’s nothing else but me – ”) and his own shaky breathing and his slamming heartbeat in his ears.

After a while he stood shakily and found a garbage bag in the kitchen. The abandoned teapot had melted into the hotplate. He recalled he hadn’t broken any records when it had happened. He had given them to Dumbledore who said with his great gentle patronizing that he was saving them until Remus came back to London. After the funeral he had looked through Sirius’s blues vinyl and could not bear to listen. Moody and Shacklebolt were standing in the door watching him and talking quietly to one another. If he went in there he would never come out.

He picked up the big pieces by hand and swept the rest into the garbage bag and lay down on the couch. It was darkening already and that night would be the new moon. He had realized long ago with a kind of removed disappointment that the hollowness he felt at this station was innate to his realest human self. This was purely him with the other gone – but there was no him with the other gone.  

Had it been before? He could not recall. Would he be like this if not? It was not worth wondering because it would never be. There would never be no wolf – there would never be no Sirius (there would never be no moon, there would never be no stars). He dozed for a while fitfully and woke again, hands aching, fingernails matted with dried blood, when his boss Floo’d him in a panic about Red Caps. It was not the last time, nor the worst.

**Author's Note:**

> this story is named after the song by X from their 1980 record los angeles. it is the first non-AU fic i have written in literally ten years. aside from the music references there also are some nods to the waste land as usual, sherwood anderson's "winesburg ohio," "classical scenes of farewell" by jim shepard, and "the crucible" by arthur miller.


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